Population: the five lawyers of the Simpson clan BY AMY WHITEAmong the five lawyers who make up the lawyer-ing branch of the Simpson family tree—Mike; histhree daughters, Michelle, Mackenzie and Maryssa;and his son-in-law, Andrew—you won’t find thesame practice area twice. Ranging from criminaldefense to civil litigation to insurance defense, thefive of them, says Michelle Simpson Tuegel, “couldform a super firm.”As it turns out, lawyering wasn’t the family biztill Mike Simpson’s generation.

“My family’s profession is ranching,” he says.

“My father and my grandfather both ranched. I wasthe first to get a college degree.”Mike does have a ranch, but as a 9-to- 5 itcan’t compete with lawyering. “When I wasyoung, in the ’60s, I was seeing all the differentchanges with people’s rights, and I wanted to bein a profession where social problems would beaddressed,” says the plaintiff’s personal injuryattorney. “What I saw during the civil rightsmovement was that lawyers were leading thechange. Seeing that was inspiring.”What his daughters saw was equally inspiring.

“Mackenzie, Maryssa and I watched our dadget up every morning and go do work that heloved,” says eldest daughter Michelle, who prac-tices criminal defense. “He has a passion and anunending amount of energy for law. When you’reexposed to how lawyers are a voice for peopleand for change—and we saw that in big and smallways through our dad—it impacted all of us.”Middle daughter Mackenzie S. Wallace eventook to carrying a briefcase around the house andwrote in her third-grade diary that she wantedto be a lawyer. “I was playing lawyer and makingMaryssa be my client,” says Mackenzie, now abusiness litigator. “I don’t think any of us grewup knowing, really, that we were little girls. Dadtreated us outside of gender norms. We werechallenged to crash through the glass ceiling.”Two of the sisters were star athletes. Michelleenjoyed a career as a professional water-skier,once ranked third in the world and first in theU.S. in women’s slalom; Maryssa Simpson wasan academic all-state basketball player beforeshe headed to UT-Austin for law school.

While Dad was the inspiration, none of thedaughters do his plaintiff’s-side work.

“When I was in middle school, I asked, ‘What ifsomeday, Dad, I’m on the other side?’” Mack-enzie remembers. “And he said, ‘ We need goodpeople on both sides.’ So it is kind of interestingthat all of us do the opposite of what he does—other than Andrew.”Andrew Tuegel, a plaintiff’s civil litigator whomet wife Michelle at Baylor, didn’t grow up in afamily of lawyers. “It didn’t really click for me thatI wanted to be a lawyer until the first day of lawschool,” he says. “To become part of a family that’sfull of lawyers has really been a great experience.”Andrew laughs when he remembers his firstSimpson holiday meal. “I kept waiting for my turnto talk, for somebody to say, ‘Andrew, what do youthink about this?’ I learned pretty quickly that’s notthe way this family works. If you have something tosay, you need to just say it.”“In our family, we don’t butt heads aboutthe kinds of law we practice,” says Maryssa, aninsurance-defense litigator. “We butt heads overtons of other things, but it seems like the law is theone area where we all help each other out.” Budding attorney Mackenzie Wallace wrote in her third-grade journalabout her dad and her future career.